Backward Glass (4 page)

Fo
u
r

The Rules

My first impression of the future came from a small room that must have been decorated by someone with a great interest in horses and someone called Bon Jovi. I shone my flashlight beam all around. I guess I had been spoiled by the distant walls of my converted attic, because it seemed claustrophobic.

“This is the future?” I whispered.

“What did you expect, space ships and flying cars? Come here, I’ll show you.” Luka dragged me to the window. “Does that tree look familiar?”

“Kind of.” To me, one tree pretty much looked like the next, but there was something in the way its lowest main branch jutted almost straight out, then changed direction and thrust upward. The street itself was just a quiet suburban subdivision. Did the cars look different? In the dark, I couldn’t tell. Maybe that one’s bumper was a little more rounded, and the same with the roof on that other one two doors down.

It was the weather that convinced me. “You’ve had more snow,” I said.

“You’re right. It’s been cold since New Year’s.”

I lingered a moment at the window. I could see now the fascination she had felt just a few minutes ago on my side of the mirror. That whole world out there was the same, but not the same. I was out there somewhere, ten years older. My parents, too. Every problem I knew about in the world had moved and changed into something else. All because I had stepped through with Luka. I pointed my flashlight back at the dresser. “How did you get it?” I said.

“My dad bought it at a garage sale just before you moved. I was, like, nine. The mirror won’t break, you know. I once threw an ashtray, full force. Not a scratch.”

“Do you know me?” I said. “I mean—me now?”

“Like I said, you moved. Just after we moved in. I don’t really remember you.”

We were by this time sitting in front of her bed, the flashlight between us. “So what’s cool about the future?” I said at last.

She shook her head. “It’s not the future, dummy, it’s just 1987. What do you expect, jetpacks and flying cars?”

“No, just—do you have anything cool?”

Luka gnawed her lower lip, then came to a decision. “Fine. Come with me. But once we get outside this room—no noise. I don’t want to know what would happen if my mom found a boy here at night.”

She insisted on turning the flashlight off for our journey downstairs, so I had to rely on her to lead me.

In the basement, Luka turned on a light, then picked up a black plastic rectangle with numbered buttons and pointed it in the direction of a large TV. Without her approaching it, and with a kind of muted
thoom,
the thing turned on. Then she went to it and touched a grey box on a shelf on the TV stand. She took away two smaller rectangular grey boxes away from it. Each one had a cross and two red buttons on its face.

She handed one to me. “You’re gonna like this.”

“What is it?”

“Nintendo. It’s what’s cool in the future.”

Two hours later, she practically had to rip the controller from my hand and force me up the stairs. “It’s almost three in the morning back in your time as well. Didn’t you say it was a school night?”

It was. Sunday here was Tuesday back home.

I didn’t care. I had been Mario. I had jumped onto turtles and mushrooms, leaped hammers and jets of fire, fallen down pits, and climbed into elevators. The future was cool.

I told Luka as much. She shrugged. “It’s better than Atari because they have more games. Melissa, in ten years? Has way better stuff. And Keisha has even better than that. Anyway, come on. I still have to show you that drawer.”

We started up the basement stairs. “How do you know about them? Keisha and Melissa?”

“Even, odd? Forward, backward? My theory? It was really only for backward. I think it’s kind of cheating when I bring you forward like this. That’s why it’ll let you go back anytime. Kind of putting things right again. Anyway, hush.”

Luka made me hot chocolate in a microwave and told me to drink up. “You have no idea how cold you’re going to be. Trust me.”

“So who made it?” I whispered, looking at the mirror
when we were back in her room with the door closed.

She shrugged. “We don’t know. In 1997? They have this thing—it’s like all of the computers in the world connected together. They call it the Internet.”

“Can you talk to it?”

Another eye roll. “No. But you can type in things and search for them. Melissa and Keisha think maybe it has something to do with your house.”

“So you really met them?” I said.

Her shrug was minimal, cool. “Sure. I guess I almost had a heart attack when Melissa first came through. Eleven o’clock at night, this girl just steps out of my mirror. Keisha came to her a few days later.”

“What about the one further up from her? Initials C.M.?”

That stopped her. “How do you know anything about way up in 2017?”

“So you haven’t met C.M.?” Oh, this was good. I knew something she didn’t.

“Of course not. Think about how hard that would be. Melissa can only come back to see me on odd-numbered days. I’d have to get her to take me with her to her time, then wait a day until Keisha could pull us up to 2007, and another one for that other kid, whatever his name is, to come back to Keisha’s time. I’d be gone for three days. My mom would kill me.”

I pursed my lips. “So we can’t ever go far from our own times?”

“We’re working on it. Sleepovers. Lies to the parents. We’ll think of something. We have a whole year, right? That’s what the note said.”

I rubbed my neck. “Yeah. But a year for what?”

Luka looked right at me, and an electric moment of communication passed between us. I had never had that with anyone before, but I knew that I knew what she was thinking, and I knew she knew I was thinking it, too. A year for what? Just for having fun, for doing something no one else on earth could do? A year for seeing the world stuttered ten years back and forth? A year for seeing that there never were any jetpacks or flying cars? Or a year for something more?

“What are you getting at?” she said.

“The dead baby,” I said. “The girl that went missing.” From my pocket, I took out the list I had found on my first day in the new house, the paper that had fallen away from the tiny, blackened corpse. I spread it in front of her and aimed my flashlight at it.

She stared at it long enough to read the words three or four times. Then she ran her forefinger over the writing at the bottom, the message to me. “So it really is about you and me,” she said.

“What do you mean, you and me?”

Luka pursed her lips. “I should have shown you before,” she said. “I just—I got so used to keeping it a secret. I never showed anyone. Since we moved in.”

Without another word, she stood up, walked to the dresser, and pulled out its top drawer. She brought it back and lay it upside down, the beam of my flashlight revealing the rough, scratched letters.

Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the
auby
one. Save the baby.

“Okay,” I said after a long, long silence.

“I found it years ago,” Luka said. “What’s that mean, an
auby
one? Did they misspell Aubrey? How is that even pronounced? Is it aw-bee or oh-bee? Or oh-bye?”

“No idea. But that’s our names.”

“I know.” She grinned and so did I. “This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened in the world. I mean—it’s really you. There’s really a Kenny.”

“Hey!” came a voice from the hallway. I heard a door open. “You on the phone with your stupid father again? Hell’s the matter with you?”

Luka’s eyes grew wide, and she snapped off the light. “Go,” she whispered, pushing me to the dresser. “Remember, it’ll be cold.” I was already pressing my hand on the glass. Just as I felt it give, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “For luck,” she said, and was gone like a shot to her bedroom door, opening it and charging out to meet her mother. “I’m not talking to anyone,” she said. “You were having some drunk dream.”

The last thing I heard in 1987, before I shoved my face into iced molasses, sounded like a slap.

Luka wasn’t kidding about the cold. It touched every part of your skin, no matter how much clothing you wore. And it held on. I closed my eyes as I pushed through. The journey didn’t seem so long this time, maybe because I had done it before, maybe just because I was coming home. No matter what reassurances Luka had given me, a part of me had been terrified of being trapped.

I took a large step through the bone-chilling cold of the mirror and felt the air of the carriage house. My forward hand found a grip on the frame and I pulled myself out, feeling like I was climbing out of a mountain of slush.

I collapsed, curled and shivering with the transit. I had never felt such cold. It went beyond skin, beyond lungs, bone, teeth. My memories, my thoughts, my whole life was freezing, clenched into a shuddering ball. The excitement of time travel drained out of me. It would be good to sleep here. Maybe if I could do that, I’d wake up and it would all be over. My mother would have more hot chocolate. My dad would tell me to take a day off school.

In the end, I only got up because of that rational inner voice, the one that had told me I didn’t want to come out here and be disappointed.

There was also the kiss still freezing on my cheek. That was worth getting moving for.

By the time I got into bed, my clock showed almost four. I had never been up this late in my life. Before I gave in to sleep, I thought ahead enough to take a final look around my room and make sure any signs of my nighttime journey were gone, my clothes scattered in their usual way, the note and the list back under my mattress.

Next thing I knew my mother was shaking me and telling me I was going to be late.

For a second day, though for different reasons, I went through the motions of school, mechanical and uninspired. Whenever I could, I replayed parts of last night. Nintendo. Welcome to the future. Nintendo. The feeling of pressing my hand onto an unyielding surface only to have it melt away. Luka. Nintendo. If I closed my eyes, I could still see Mario running and jumping through castles and fields.

And feel that kiss.

At eleven that night, I sat by my window, wishing it faced the carriage house. It was an odd-numbered day now, so if the note from future me was for real, nobody should be coming through. But didn’t that mean this “Jimmy Hayes, 1967” might be waiting for me ten years back? Did he even know about the mirror? Had he already gone to 1957?

Luka had done it. She had just stepped through the mirror and into my time. Melissa and Keisha as well. And there was a note, two now, asking for our help. I had to go, didn’t I?

But ten years. No one in the world would know me. I would be a four-year-old out there. What if I got caught? What if Luka was wrong and the mirror broke? Why didn’t any of these other stupid kids on the list have these fears? What kind of idiots were they?

I couldn’t do this.

I couldn’t.

At eleven thirty, I crept down to the first floor and spent fifteen minutes assembling the most complete survival-in-the-past backpack I could think of. Two flashlights, a handful of chocolate bar, a half bottle of juice, and all the quarters I could find so at least I’d have some money. Some of them had post-1967 dates, but I figured they’d still be more convincing than paper money, which I’d checked and found all marked 1972.

Two minutes before midnight.

Help me make it not happen, Kenny.

Help me make it not happen.

Kenny.

I put my hand on the mirror and pushed.

Either I was getting used to the resistance, or it was getting easier. The cold was still there, worse than any January wind on bare skin, but I pushed through faster this time, got my hand on the other side, braced it on the mirror in the past, then pulled my head and shoulders after it.

For all my caution, I misjudged my balance. I got a look at a flickering light, and maybe two figures near it, then I tumbled out, the mirror loosening its grip on me, and fell onto the floor of the carriage house.

“There he is,” said a voice from below. “Get him!”

Five

The Rules

Boots thumped up the stairs, and before I could get on my feet, someone grabbed me. Two someones. They grasped my arms, pulled me up, and marched me down the stairs. I slipped once and cracked my knee, but they didn’t let go.

The flickering came from a Coleman stove. The bigger of the two kids holding me turned me toward him. “Well,” he said. “If it isn’t the kid from the future. What’ve you got for us, H. G. Wells?”

He was bigger than me, seventeen or eighteen maybe. “Here,” he said, “let’s have a look at the backpack.” He took it from me. I held my hands at my sides and shivered. The hand warmers helped, as did the flickering flame of the Coleman stove, but I was still almost incapacitated by the chill of time travel. “I’m Rick,” he said, opening my backpack and looking at my thermos, wrapped coins, spare batteries, pen, paper, and Hershey bars. “No smokes? What’s your name, kid?”

“Kenny Maxwell.”

“Well, Kenneth Maxwell,” he said, “welcome to the past. Have a seat.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and I let myself be guided down. He sat too, and waved to the other kid to do the same. “Listen, Rick,” the other kid said. “Maybe I should go. We don’t want my folks to wake up.”

Now that I could see him, this other kid was only an inch taller than me. He had a mess of sandy hair and looked nervous.

“Sit down, Jimmy,” said Rick. “You got no curiosity? Kid’s from 1977. Isn’t that right, H. G. Wells?” I nodded. They had seen me come out of the mirror and seemed to know what was going on. Why deny it? “So, what’s happened in the future, Kenneth? We’ve been waiting a while for you. We were beginning to think you’d had a nuclear war up there and you weren’t coming. You look kind of good for a mutant monster, though. Did the Ruskies attack?”

“No,” I said. “Not even in 1987 or 1997 or 2007.” Instantly, I knew I had said too much.

Rick leaned forward. “Really? Time traveler knows a lot. Who you been talking to, H. G?”

“A girl. She came back from 1987. She told me about the other ones.” I tried to think about what Luka had said. You were only allowed to go forward if you were going with someone from the future. Maybe Rick didn’t know that.

Rick took my things out of the backpack, giving Jimmy a running commentary. “Nice flashlight. Bet I can get a buck or two for that. Chocolate’s always good. What’s this? Trying to make a black jack?” He took my quarters out of the socks and as soon as he saw what they were, vanished the money into his pockets. The Hershey bars he shared around, even handing one to me and insisting that I eat it. “Come on. We’re all in this together, right?” He looked at Jimmy, who nodded reluctantly.

As Rick did all this, I studied him. His head was covered in a cloud of black curls and his face still troubled with acne. His hands were huge, but his shoulders weren’t as wide as I had thought at first. Once he had finished with the backpack, he made me turn out my empty pockets. He took my hat and gloves and gave them to Jimmy.

“What’s your story, Kenneth Maxwell?” Rick said. “How’d you find out about my little mirror here?”

His mirror?

Thinking as fast as I could, I told him an edited version of the facts. My encounters with Luka, my journey into the future. He was interested to hear that the mirror was still in the carriage house in my time, and even more interested that the place itself was gone ten years later. He wanted to know if I knew who my dad had bought the house from. I told him nobody had lived in it for a few years, and I didn’t know who was there before. “Hear anything about the Beech family? No?”

He didn’t ask about the other kid’s family. Jimmy sat looking miserable.

“You ever think about what you could do with this?” Rick said. “Friend of my dad’s deals in old stuff. This one time, I helped some old lady clean out her attic after her husband died. I found these boxes of old magazines and comic books. The old lady paid me a dollar to take it to the dump, then my dad’s buddy paid me twenty bucks for the stuff. Twenty bucks. That’s nothing compared to what we could do. Go back ten years, buy up a bunch of cheap stuff, then go up to your time or that girl’s and sell it all for a mint.”

“I don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to be about,” I said, reaching out to warm my hands in the small flame of his Coleman stove.

Rick looked up sharply. “You don’t think what? What’s what supposed to be about, Kenneth?”

I flinched from his anger, but pushed on, pretending it was like the impersonal cold or heat of the mirror. “The mirror,” I said, not even wanting to look up to the second floor, not wanting to let him know how much I just wanted to run back into it. “I don’t think it’s about us getting rich. I got a—there was a note. Left for me. It said my name. Somebody was asking me for help from the past. Something about a baby that got killed.”

Rick greeted these revelations with a long, stony silence. “Well,” he said at last, “nobody here’s asking for your help.”

Fine, I wanted to say, I’ll just be on my way, then. But I didn’t want to let him know just how much I wanted out of here.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Jimmy. “Things are just fine
here. How do we know you’re telling the truth, anyway?
Maybe you broke into my folks’ house to go into the mirror. See, Rick, I think we gotta get rid of that thing. There’s no telling who could—”

Rick raised his hand to shut Jimmy up. “So what are you here for? That’s the question, isn’t it? You came here to help somebody, is that it?”

I studied his face for a moment before answering. It wasn’t a bully question, the kind where there’s no right answer and you’re just going to get interrupted or pushed or hit whatever you say. He actually wanted an answer. “How could I not go?” I said. “It’s time travel. And there’s something about a baby. I think I’m supposed to save it. It was—it was hidden in the walls. Like someone killed it and hid it there. With a note asking me for help.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Man, that’s crazy. I mean, you’re lucky it was us here. This old place—technically, my folks rent it from Rick’s dad, but he doesn’t come out here much. All kinds of stuff goes on here. I’m not even allowed to be here. Kids with wild parties. Pete Masterson’s crew gets drunk here sometimes. Like if it was a Friday or a Saturday night, and you came out of there—no way.”

“That’s why he’s got us,” said Rick. His gaze still hadn’t left my face.

Jimmy swallowed. “Sure, Rick, sure. But he should just stay home is all I’m saying. You know? I could even—we could give him back his stuff, too. We could give it back and just push him back through and—that’s it. Too dangerous, you know?”

“Jimmy, shut up a minute, will you?” Rick said it without any inflection. He scratched his chin and kept looking at me. “What about it? Is that what you’re going to do? Never come back?” He waved his hand impatiently when I hesitated. “Not what you think I want you to say. The truth. Are you coming back?”

A long moment stretched between us. Jimmy cleared his throat. “Uh, Rick? My dad? He could wake up any time. He don’t find me in the house, he’ll come looking, you know?”

“Fine.” Rick didn’t even look at him, just kept his gaze fixed on me. I realized I had gotten it wrong. There was still baby fat in his face, still a kid in there. “Get out of here, then. Leave the kid’s stuff here.”

Jimmy hesitated briefly at the door to give me a look that might have been an apology. Then he was gone.

Rick let another long moment of silence follow the click of the carriage house door. “How old are you, kid?” he said at last.

“Fifteen.” He looked at me dubiously, and I amended, “In a couple of months.” Still a lie. My birthday wasn’t for half a year.

“You can take your backpack,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. Wondering if he might change his mind, I got up and went to pick it up.

“Can you believe it?” he said. “Eight years ago, I found a diary. Most of it makes no sense. But it talked about the mirror. About when the guy was a kid and he went through it and met his own mother before she was his mother. Crazy stuff. He said how the mirror was unbreakable, how it chose one kid every ten years to get to go back in time.”

“And you waited,” I said.

“Not at first. Didn’t believe it. But the idea was cool.” I nodded. I had felt the same way about my list. “Last year Jimmy tells me about this mirror. He’s up here one day fooling around, and he throws a baseball right at it. For kicks. Doesn’t break. He brings me in to see it. Man, I couldn’t lay a scratch on that thing.” Rick scratched his chin and looked at me.

“You’re too old, aren’t you?”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that it? The diary didn’t say anything about age. There’s a rule?”

“I got a note,” I said. “I mean—I sent it, I think. To the girl twenty years later. It says the mirror never takes anyone older than sixteen.”

Rick closed his eyes and shook his head. “Found that goddamn diary when I was nine years old underneath an old floorboard. Too old.”

“But not Jimmy.”

His eyes were still screwed shut. “Jimmy goddamn Hayes,” he said. “Kid’s got the guts of a bed-wetting chipmunk. January second.” He shook his head. “I let him stick around while I was going to go in, right? I didn’t even tell him about the diary. I just wanted to amaze him. Stole some smokes from my dad, brought Jimmy in here, and just casually leaned against the mirror. Nothing. I got so mad, I pushed him into it.” He opened his eyes for the first time in a couple of minutes and looked right at me. “Took him three hours to come back. He ended up in some basement. Thought it was me playing a joke, and started yelling for me. Someone came, and he ran out of there. Spent all that time wandering around, then snuck back in a window. Course, at the time, he didn’t even know what was going on. I had to explain when he got back.” Rick dropped his cigarette and ground it into the floor. “So you think it’s all about this dead baby? Some kind of mission in the past?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean—I think so. The girl from 1987, Luka. She found a message as well. It told her to help me.”

“But how can you save the kid if you’ve already found its body?”

I held up my hands. “I don’t know. I don’t get it. But somebody asked for my help.”

Rick closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, then let it out through his teeth in a long sigh. “You’re a weird kid, you know that? Okay, H. G. Wells.” He stuck his hand in the inside pocket of his jean jacket and brought out a squat leather-bound book with pages sticking out of it.

“What is it?” I said, looking at his outstretched hand.

“The diary. I can’t make much sense of it. There’s the mirror stuff, and some stuff about jobs he had, but the rest? Guy thinks he’s two different people or something. Take a look anyway.”

“Why are you giving this to me?”

He looked away. The light of the Coleman stove caught a bitter twist in his face. “Comic books. That was my big idea, you know that? I mean, I thought about stock market and crap like that as well, but I figured who wants to figure out how to invest in stocks. I figured I’d get all the other kids who could go into the mirror—we’d pass stuff up and down the line and make some money.” He shook his head. “Christ. Time travel—and I wanted to sell comic books. Go on, H. G. Wells. Take it. Save the baby. Maybe there’s a reason the damn mirror didn’t open up for me.”